Our Life in the Forest

In this darkly funny novel crossing the dystopian visions of Helen DeWitt and Kazuo Ishiguro, a woman writes from a forest encampment at the end of the world. I opened my eye and BANG, everything came into focus. In the near future, our woman in the forest is nearing the end. She's down an eye and a kidney; she's lost the use of one hand; she knows she won't have time to reread what she writes here. Her other half, Marie (a.k.a. Sissy)--around whom our narrator has unwisely constructed her identity, and whom she sacrificed a great deal to set free--is an idiot: deeply incurious, barely ambulatory, and horny. It's hardly Marie's fault (she's a clone). But our half was hoping for more. In a torrential narrative, with asides for barking laughter, our woman in the forest casts her single roving eye across the opaque mechanisms of their shared past and the strange world that made them (one that is nevertheless familiar in its vices)--driven to understand and communicate, in writing, her conditional personhood. Our Life in the Forest is an unrelenting novel about complicity, love, and the failing body: an irreverent and deeply compelling addition to the female apocalyptic tradition.

Marie Darrieussecq's first book, Pig Tales, became an overnight sensation and bestseller, selling more than 300,000 copies and translated into more than thirty languages--since then, she has gone on to publish twenty more, including Being Here, a literary investigation into the life of the artist Paula Modersohn-Becker, and the novels Men, The Baby, and Our Life in the Forest. The New Yorker described her as France's "best young novelist," and she is recognized as one of the leading voices of French contemporary literature. Her novel Men was awarded the Prix Médicis and the Prix des Prix in 2013. Penny Hueston's translations from French include novels by Emmanuelle Salasc and Patrick Modiano and eight books by Marie Darrieussecq. She has been shortlisted for the JQ-Wingate Prize, the Warwick Prize for Women in Translation, twice for the Scott Moncrief Prize, and twice for the New South Wales Premier's Translation Prize, and she was the winner of the 2020 Medal for Excellence in Translation.